Is it baboons, rather than chimps, that really epitomise machiavellian intelligence?
(writing in progress)
Baboons are arguably the primates most similar to humans in social complexity and social versatility.
Morality may have adaptive value. The well-known primatologist Frans de Waal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal) has made a career from exploring this in a series of about ten books. His angle, in part, is that apes evolved morality as an adaptive strategy. This line of evolution has produced our own, human, morality.
But a possibility missed by de Waal may be that morality and social complexity are different adaptive strategies. Overlapping, certainly, but not not necessarily concomitant.
In this Post I refer to 'baboons' as including not only Papio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baboon), but also Theropithecus and Mandrillus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandrillus). See https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo5387727.html and https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691628929/in-quest-of-the-sacred-baboon.
Are baboons ‘proto-apes’, in the sense that they are part of the same overall adaptive trend towards something human-like? Or do they represent a different direction of adaptation, socially complex but devoid of proto-morality?
Nobody doubts that apes such as chimps (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_(genus)) are, socially and morally, ‘proto-humans’. However, to assume that baboons are, in the same sense, ‘proto-chimps’ is – I suspect – a mistake made implicitly/subconsciously by primatologists.
Baboons may show a different adaptive strategy, emphasising social complexity without any trace of the moral principles that we humans so understandably assume to go with social complexity. These Old World monkeys may possibly have evolved a peculiarly amoral or non-empathic society.
There would be nothing surprising about the amorality or lack of cognitive empathy in baboons if they were not so complex and versatile socially. However, given that baboons are more – not less - socially complex than chimps, it is puzzling that they show negligible morality/cognitive empathy. De Waal may have assumed that any hint of morality in the behaviour of baboons reflects an incipient morality. By contrast, I suspect that it reflects a vestigial morality - in the sense that in baboons the social complexity and versatility have actually been developed to the preclusion of moral evolution.
Morality is based on the distinction between right and wrong, or good and bad. I hypothesise that baboons are peculiarly unable to discern right from wrong, or good from bad, considering how extremely social they are.
Imagine an individual baboon in its natural group. The group consists of hundreds of individuals (actually up to about 1000 in Theropithecus gelada, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelada). This individual is so socially intelligent (by virtue of a brain comparable to that of an ape in its size relative to body size) that it can recognise hundreds of individuals, and can know and follow the status of scores, if not hundreds, of these.
In a group of the chacma baboon, there is evidence that each juvenile to adult individual knows and follows (in the sense of the status updates on Facebook) the status of up to about 100 other individuals. That is impressive even by human standards, and – as far as I know – beyond the capacities of apes, which live in small groups. The social structure of chimps is looser and more nebulous than that of baboons.
So, much time and energy goes into cognition in baboons, and this cognition is all about ‘who’s who in the zoo'. Baboons are, as it were, the inventors of the facebook concept, and it almost seems that their large brains (about fivefold more massive than those of kangaroos of equivalent body mass) are devoted mainly to this social busy-ness.
But our baboon individual – despite this proficiency in recognising and following its group-members – betrays in many small ways how poor it is in discerning right from wrong/good from bad. Students of the behaviour of baboons have found repeatedly how different the morality of baboons is from that espoused by humans.
For example:
- no adult baboon ever plays, or shows any sense of humour, despite the extreme playfulness of pre-pubertal juveniles;
- no baboon seems to perform any act that is unambiguously altruistic; acts of what we humans would recognise as kindness are scarce and ambivalent in baboons;
- no individual baboon ever teaches another individual anything;
- no individual baboon ever shares food with another individual, or for that matter gives it any object or material at all as an active ‘here, take this’ gift;
- even the concept of courtship seems alien to baboons, the only such behaviour being ambivalent in the sense that males seem to have no ethic of generosity towards females of the species; what seem, at first glance, to be ‘special friendships’ between male and female usually turn out, on closer examination, to have ulterior motives (e.g. the male is probably the father of the last offspring of the female in question, so has a stake in protecting this offspring simply in terms of reproductive success, something for which no element of morality needs to be invoked);
- even mothers are not consistently caring with their offspring, in some instances not even responding to the distressed cries of their own lost juveniles unless they themselves are also lost;
- mothers grieve if one of their infants dies. However, there is be no consolation or acknowledgement from any members of the group; baboons grieve alone.
Picture this: an infant emerges from a thicket with a newly broken arm, dangling limp from the shoulder. It rushes to the consolation of its mother, which embraces the infant eagerly. But there seems to be no acknowledgement of the injury, either at that moment or subsequently. And the mother proves to be no less callous or more accommodating to the life-threatening injury of her infant than is any other member of the group.
Two books by Cheney and Seyfarth are ‘How monkeys see the world: inside the mind of another species’ (1990) and ‘Baboon metaphysics: the evolution of a social mind’ (2007). Although written 17 years apart, they report similar findings for studies of the vervet monkey in Amboseli National Park and the chacma baboon in the Okavango.
For me, the biggest surprise from these research projects is how poor the mothering behaviour is in these primates. They seem remarkably obtuse in several ways, when it comes to what should be the most elementary aspects of parenting.
One would expect that maternal protection of infants in primates would be particularly well-developed, given the great longevity and slow reproduction in monkeys.
For example:
The vervet monkey lacks any kind of call to the effect of ‘follow me’, despite having an otherwise surprisingly elaborate vocabulary of alarm calls and social grunts. Thus infants and juveniles find themselves in peril where a simple ‘follow me’ would have saved the day.
Mothers of the chacma baboon often outdistance their infants or dependent juveniles, for example when crossing stretches of water in the Okavango. The youngsters scream with fear and anxiety. The mothers react to these vocalisations, but do not go back to help their young. Sometimes a group leaves several juveniles behind on an island, where the juveniles are forced to survive for days as best they can, huddling anxiously and vocalising in distress. The adults are within earshot, but do not bother to go back to collect their young, which are easy prey for several predators in the Okavango.
Mothers of these two primate species seem to show no empathy towards their own offspring, although of course a mother will grab its infant in a crisis in response to the infant’s cries, in a reactive, mechanical kind of way.
Sometimes, when the chacma baboon crosses water in the Okavango, infants, clinging to the bellies of their mothers, simply drown because the mother is careless about the fact that her belly is submerged for too long. More surprisingly still, mothers seems oblivious that submerging infants in this way is to be avoided.
In case readers think I am exaggerating, here are some relevant quotes from these books:
“baboons often also seem to be insensitive to small juveniles’ intense fear and distress during long water crossings. At the initiation of any water crossing, the smaller juveniles congregate at the water’s edge, whining, screaming, writhing on the ground, and lashing their tails...[some mothers react protectively]...Other mothers, though, forge blithely ahead, leaving their offspring to fend for themselves...[often with fatal results’']...Although the mother of an abandoned juvenile sometimes gives contact barks in response to her offspring’s panicked screams on the opposite shore, she rarely crosses back to retrieve it. And eventually she moves away with the rest of the group – lagging behind, looking back at the crossing, and giving occasional contact barks as the screams fade into the distance.”
More on the chacma baboon: “Despite their strong behavioural responses..., mothers were no more likely to answer their own infant’s calls than they were the calls of another infant...when baboon mothers lose track of their infants, they sometimes become quite frantic in their attempts to locate them, climbing into trees and giving contact barks for long periods of time. But when the infant finally leaves his play group and reappears, his mother never cuffs or admonishes him for ignoring her...Instead, the mother simply stops giving contact barks...When the group finally reunites...the separated parties do not run up to each other in joyful embrace. They simply approach each other, cease calling, and resume foraging. It is as if, once reunited, all emotions surrounding the separation simply disappear.”
Louise Barrett, on pp. 59ff of her semi-popular book ‘Baboons: survivors of the African continent’ (2000), reviews what is obviously a detailed literature based on long-term studies. She states that there is great variation among individual mothers in protectiveness of infants. This variation is not only a matter of personality, but also reflects the conditions at the time and place; e.g. in captivity the mothers are more casual than in the wild.
However, the results are counterintuitive: it is the less-protected infants that tend more to survive. She does not offer any interpretation (other than to point out that strictly arboreal monkeys tend to have stricter parenting, something she explains in terms of the risk of falling from trees). (This may possibly support an interpretation w.r.t. microbes being more important than predators in the overall life-history strategy of baboons, see my Post elsewhere.)
Barrett writes “Interestingly, both male and female infants of over-protective mothers take longer to mesh their behaviour with their mothers’ than the infants of casual mothers do. This might seem paradoxical, as over-protected infants spend more time with their mothers and should therefore learn more quickly. However, over-protecting an infant actually inhibits its ability to learn. Rather than learning about their mothers’ behaviour, infants who are over-protected learn instead that they have no control over what they want to do and they become very frustrated. After a time, their response to over-protection is to stop trying to do things for themselves. As a result, the infants learn much more slowly, because they are no longer willing to investigate and explore new opportunities.”
This seems consistent with the lack of a behavioural repertoire of teaching by parents in baboons. Not only do the mothers not teach their infants/juveniles anything, but when they inadvertently limit the opportunities of infants/juveniles to make their own mistakes, they actually retard the offspring.
I also note that this parental strategy is consistent with the extreme gregariousness of baboons. Since juveniles learn mainly by playing with each other, they depend on a certain minimum group-size to provide sufficient numbers of same-age playmates.
As Barrett points out on page 68 that, during dry seasons when food is scarce, play virtually ceases because the juveniles lack the energy for play.
She also mentions, in passing, another fact based on the literature. In the gelada, ‘Infants born in the wet season are wet and cold almost all the time, and they die from chest infections and hypothermia’. This raises questions. I understand that, as a grazer, the gelada times its reproduction partly so that mothers can exploit green grass. However, why has the gelada not evolved some kind of specialised huddling repertoire to ensure that infants stay dry and warm? In particular it strikes me that males, which are downright shaggy, could so easily insulate the infants while foraging. So again, if one reads carefully between the lines, the tendency for infection to kill the gelada in infancy seems significant.
So, while de Waal and others may have assumed that baboons have a primitive morality, I suspect that what they may have instead is a ‘specially adapted amorality’. Whereas humans may be specialised as ‘the most moral of the primates’, baboons may be specialised as ‘the most amoral of the primates’. It may be misleading that the two lineages both show great social complexity and versatility.
Humans know right from wrong/good from bad, even if we fail our own standards. Baboons seem to emulate our political consciousness. However, there are extremely few individuals among baboons who act as if they know right from wrong/good from bad. The result is that baboons have societies that appeal to our humanity profoundly in the sense of mirroring so many layers and levels of what we recognise as family, society, and politics – but without reflecting the morality that we intuitively expect as part of this degree of sociality.
Frans de Waal (1982), in his book ‘Chimpanzee Politics’ (https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/9383/chimpanzee-politics#:~:text=The%20first%20edition%20of%20Frans,basic%20human%20needs%20and%20behaviors. and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/389530.Chimpanzee_Politics), coined the term ‘machiavellian intelligence’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiavellian_intelligence). The dictionary definition (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Machiavellian) of the word ‘machiavellian’ implies amorality and a lack of empathy.
However, de Waal may have overlooked the possibility that, partly machiavellian though chimps undoubtedly are, baboons are more machiavellian. I suspect that de Waal did not fully realise that machiavellian intelligence is by definition amoral or non-empathetic intelligence.
The idea, that baboons are surprisingly amoral and non-empathetic relative to their great social complexity and versatility, is not necessarily new. Frans de Waal realised what machiavellian intelligence is, 40 years ago. What may be new is my idea that it is not chimps but baboons that epitomise machiavellian intelligence.
Chimps have machiavellian intelligence as an element of their psyche (more so than in humans, perhaps). However, baboons are the ones that epitomise this kind of intelligence, and which deserve to be used to illustrate it in its purest form within the Primates (the spotted hyena, Crocuta crocuta, possibly rivals baboons in this kind of intelligence within the Carnivora).
Did Frans de Waal possibly fail to realise that baboons are not just ‘proto-apes’, but forms of primates that specialise in machiavellian intelligence?
(writing in progress)
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A graphic example of the lack of 'kindness' in baboons is as follows. If a member of the group breaks its arm, and the arm is hanging limply from its side, there is no acknowledgement of the pain or discomfort from other individuals - or even from its own mother. The others do not wait for the injured individual to catch up with the group, do not feed it, do not console it, and do not play less roughly with it. There seems to be no capacity to put themselves in another’s shoes, and treat thy neighbour as thou would be treated. When we observe baboons there is a natural inclination for us to assume that they are experiencing similar subconscious motivations to us, in terms of relationships. However, this seems untrue.
Baboons seem devoid of humour. Yes, group members play with each other. However, among adults there seems to be no laughter (in contrast to e.g. chimps), and even among juveniles the play seems to lack what we would interpret as reciprocity emanating from empathy. This is perhaps because humour requires ‘putting oneself in someone else’s shoes’, and baboons are largely incapable of this mental process.
The treatment of infants by males highlights the lack of compassion or feeling towards fellow members of the groups. Adult males frequently take infants hostage, using them as ‘shields’ in fights with other males. Deliberate infanticide is also common. In some groups, more than half the infants are killed by males. New adult male individuals immigrate from adjacent groups, and try to insinuate themselves in the new group, as high up the male hierarchy as possible and by habituating themselves to females. As soon as they gain any status at the expense of the original males, they take opportunities to kill any infants present. This is sometimes done as soon as they start throwing their weight about beyond the capacities of the resident males to control, and it is sometimes done later, after a given mother has become habituated to the new male and he ‘betrays’ this acceptance by suddenly snatching her infant and killing it. I have not heard of the established male individuals (i.e. once the new males have already inseminated resident females) continuing to practise infanticide. Instead, it is part of a takeover strategy. It may last perhaps up to a year, but only until the new males have fathered new infants of uncertain paternity, which they do not kill, having neither much incentive to kill them nor any assurance that the infants are not their own.
@beartracker
There are at least three stages in one’s education about the real nature of baboons.
Firstly one assumes, as does every farmer in South Africa, that these animals are beneath contempt, and any resemblance to humans is more an insult to us than their merit.
Secondly, one finds out – on actually observing the details – that there is much more similarity to human society than one might expect for such savage animals. These include marriage, politicking, strategizing, acutely observing, status-tracking, remembering, voting (in the case of the hamadryas, as documented by Hans Kummer), cheating, manners, congregations stratified into family/clan/band, astonishingly human-sounding ‘conversation' of grunts etc., astonishing capacity for individual recognition by sight and sound, respect for property, aristocracy, etc. There is a surprising degree of individuality (true personality), and extreme emotionality is reflected in all the dizzying social busy-ness of the group when not foraging or sleeping.
Thirdly, one goes on – if one really seeks to understand – to try to reconcile their beneath-contempt image with this surprisingly human edifice/facade. And one finds oneself coming full circle in a way, finding that, even in their most human-like behaviours, baboons reveal themselves to lack certain values (e.g. fair play, sympathy, altruism, selflessness, charity, etc.) that we humans hold as our standard, even if we often fall short of them ourselves. We find to our dismay that animals with so many similarities to our own societies are savage in a way more disturbing than the animal savagery we assumed at the start: a kind of betrayal of human values that means that their meanness is all the more disturbing in seeming to be a ‘treason of doing the right thing for the wrong reason’.
In the chacma baboon, each individual in a group of 80 individuals can recognise every other individual, not only by sight but by the individual sound of each of its 14 calls (bark, grunt, scream, etc.). Each individual can keep track of the day-to-day and hour-to-hour changes in social status of most other individuals in the group, in something resembling a complex soap-opera.
When are morality and kindness amongst social primates an advantage versus a disadvantage for survival? Perhaps morality and kindness are only needed when the main competitive advantage of the primate is technological innovation and the ability to rapidly transfer knowledge between individuals. This type of cooperation arguably requires relationships between individuals founded on a recognition of the viewpoint of another as opposed to one’s own viewpoint. If this is true, then we humans can view the amorality and unkindness in baboon societies through different eyes. There is no need for judgement, merely acknowledgement that morality and kindness are adaptive for us but not necessarily for them.
Depending on the species involved, baboons’ lives involve forms of marriage, voting, intense politics, alliances, devious strategizing, manners, cheating, respect for property, and aristocracy. Individual baboons also have surprisingly distinct personalities; some are for example unpopular bullies, and generally disliked by the group, whereas others are shy and lacking in talent. It is consequently tempting to assume when watching baboons mating, playing, and grooming, that their society, like ours, is partly held together by traits such as kindness, altruism, compassion and empathy. Somewhat disturbingly, the facts do not support this view. Yes, mothers care for their infants, and bonds based on mutual grooming form between adults, but researchers have repeatedly found that even within parental or friendly relationships an individual baboon is largely incapable of “putting itself in the shoes” of its infant or friend. This is surprising for animals that have a social fabric so ostensibly conducive to kindness; i.e. the anomaly is that baboons seem to be like human sociopaths in the sense that they have all the circumstances and seeming incentives for a flourishing of altruism, but seem to avoid altruism almost as a matter of policy.. They do not, for example, acknowledge another’s grief, pain, or suffering, do not give each other anything (a male will allow his consort to remove a corn cob from under his arm), and do not teach one another new skills. Researchers who study baboons for decades tend to end up tacitly disappointed in their chosen animal, because they realise over time that these are, by and large, in human terms, animals so amoral that they seem selfish – perhaps even sociopathic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTIX-LZWY6A
After reading Cheney and Seyfarth:
It is noteworthy that the vervet monkey is a poor naturalist.
For example, this species seems clueless when stumbling on fresh kills by the lion, apparently not thinking ‘this means that's predator may be about’. Likewise when it finds the fresh carcase of a gazelle in a tree, apparently not realising that a leopard – the monkey's greatest enemy – is probably nearby. In these ways, by comparison with humans, this monkey just seems stupid.
The vervet monkey seems clueless about the tracks of large individuals of Python sebae, doing things as stupid as actually walking along the snake’s track into the bush where the snake is lying up, and then reacting with shock and alarm when virtually walking on to the snake.
The vervet monkey fears the Maasai, and by extension give alarm calls when Maasai livestock appear. However, it is clueless when a large cloud of dust announces the imminent arrival of the Maasai herders. This monkey has to see the livestock or people, or hear the cowbells, before recognising the danger.
Cheney and Seyfarth found no evidence that mothers of the vervet monkey ever correct their infants’ mistakes; there is no parental instruction. “Female vervets will often leave their infants behind in trees when the group moves off at the approach of baboons, or when it moves on to another feeding grove. A mother will watch impassively as her infant screams and struggles to descend a tree, often falling and even injuring himself...the same female who abandons her infant in a tree will race to retrieve her infant and carry him to safety at the sound of an alarm call...”
It is easy to assume that males of baboons tend to protect infants of their own species. And indeed it is true that males of baboons inadvertently protect their group (including infants), and allow infants to play with them. This is certainly paternal care, albeit rudimentary. However, this is countered by the fact that males of baboons use infants as living shields. This risks the lives of the infants (possibly including their own offspring) for the sake of inter-male quarrels. The following videos show this: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1263117840751569 and https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1261034057626614 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw4ycv7LULw. Overall, then, I do not find baboons to be a good example of paternal care. And indeed most primates show no more paternal care than baboons do. Even in the case of humans, polygamous societies show little paternal care sensu stricto, because men protect and provide for their extended family without necessarily protecting and providing for their own infants directly. In terms of paternal care, humans are certainly above the level of chimps (which show virtually no paternal care), perhaps above the level of baboons (which show some paternal care but detract from it in the behaviour mentioned above), and below the level of small, primitive monkeys in South America belonging to three families (Callitrichidae, Aotidae, Pitheciidae). Overall, primates show only modest levels of paternal care.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJF01_ztxwY
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